Drawn: The Painted Tower HD iPad Review

Drawn: The Painted Tower HD may be yet another point and click adventure game for the iOS platform, but even if you're not a die-hard fan of the genre, you might want to give it a look. Due to its mesmerizing, high-resolution imagery and entrancing music, this app ranks amongst the elite in its category.

Your job is to find Iris, a young girl known for her ability to bring paintings to life, but to do so you'll have to make your way up a fantastical tower. Each floor contains several tattered paintings that require your help to restore. So you'll comb through each floor and gather clues that will help you solve the numerous puzzles that you'll encounter on your journey to rescue the girl.

While the difficulty of these puzzles increases as you move forward in game, most puzzles can be solved with a little thought and creativity. If you get completely stumped you can ask for hints, but figuring things out on your own is the fun part. As a bonus, solving puzzles grants you Game Center achievements.

While we've seen complaints about the game crashing, we never experienced any of these bugs. Overall, we found the app to be fairly stable and pleasant to use, although the game lags on occasiona and navigation can be cumbersome. For example, when in a room with many areas to explore, you consistently have to zoom in on one area, then back out, and back in on the next area. Instead, we’d like to be able to hop from one area to another more efficiently.

But the cleverness of some of the puzzles makes up for minor navigation quirks and occasional slowness. In particular, we found the “recipe for success” puzzle to be rather ingenious. By giving a Witch Doctor some gathered objects and using nearby tools to prepare the ingredients prior to mixing, you can attempt to create the perfect potion. Doing so successfully makes higher floors accessible through a magical gateway that may or may not lead you to your desired location... We’d tell you more but we don’t want to spoil the fun.

If this sounds at all enticing to you, we urge you to give this game a shot. With over 70 levels of puzzles, you’re bound to find yourself amused (and often stumped) for hours on end.